Transcript greek pottery

Greek Pottery
Questions you should be able to answer at the end
of this presentation
What is black-figure pottery?
What is red-figure pottery?
Why is Greek pottery so famous?
• Very few Greek painted pictures have
survived the 2500 years since they were
painted. So most of what we know about
Greek art comes from the pictures they
painted on fancy pottery. Pottery, even if it
gets broken, can be put back together,
and a good deal of it has even survived
whole, mostly in Etruscan tombs.
Aphrodite
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Dionysus: Dionysus was the
god of wine, theatre, and
madness
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His mother was Semele,
daughter of King Cadmus of
Thebes, his father was Zeus.
When Semele was killed after
seeing Zeus in his full glory,
Dionysus was snatched from his
mother's body and placed into
Zeus' thigh, from which he was
born.
•
At the Greater and Lesser
Dionysia, dramas were
performed in honor of the god. It
is at this festival that the great
playwrights of the Classical age
put on their plays.
Greek Pottery:
Black-Figure
• Greek Pottery: Black-Figure
• In Athens, in the Archaic period,
potters continued to make the clay
pots with mythological scenes on
them. At the same time, a new
painting technique developed.
Instead of painting figures of
people in outline, the Athenian
potters began to paint people in
silhouette: this is called blackfigure, because the people are all
black.
Greek Red-Figure Pottery
•
Around 530 BC, Athenian potters were
more and more frustrated by the blackfigure way of vase-painting. They
wanted to paint figures that
overlapped, for instance, which was
very difficult to do in black figure
without the whole thing looking like just
a big black blob.
•
So somebody had an idea: instead of
painting the people black, why not
paint the background black and leave
the people red? This is harder because
you have to carefully paint all around
the people in the picture, but it makes
the people look much more real.
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Berlin Painter.
Now It’s Your Turn:
• You are going to create your own small
piece of Greek Inspired Pottery
• Take a square piece of paper and fold it in
half. Open it and fold it in half the other
way. Open it and fold it at a diagonal.
Open it and fold the other diagonal
• Draw a ¼ inch border around the square
piece of paper.
• Fold you paper into a triangle
• On the triangle you are going to plan a
design that will be duplicated and
transferred onto your tile.
• What’s a Motif?
What is a Motif?
• In art, a motif is a repeated idea, pattern,
image, or theme.
Choose your Motif
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Oceans
Forests
Mountain
Desert
City
• Or if you need a challenge..research your
cultural background and symbols and create a
design based upon what you find.